Bringing the glad tidings that my favourite animation tool seems to be coming back!

Xtranormal was a hugely popular video making tool with hundreds of teachers making videos for free, choosing characters, scenes, camera angles and really achieving a very professional looking outcome.

Until they went bust. Despite its popularity, Xtranormal was not able to go on as a company and quietly went under about two or three years ago.  Some of the reasons have to do with the numerous free accounts and the cost of the huge amount of space they needed in order to store all these free videos. Read my related post here about free services.

For a long time there was silence – complete silence about why or what was to happen.

Until, almost two years ago, a new site redirected from the old site gave some hope.

It looks like good news for now – the new service called nawmal is about to launch in December 2015

Watch their promo – it looks as good as it used to be and although it won’t come cheap, there is a lower price for schools and educators or students. Given the technology it takes to get done, I am not surprised.

It looks like the same technology and they do have some affordable pricing plans for schools

 

 

 

nawmal

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Camera Angles, Backgrounds, Effects and more!

Using these animations and camera angles, faceless coursebook dialogues could come to life and student dialogues could be turned into great sketches.

ELT teachers are not the only people who found it useful – Here is an example made by a teacher in the hospitality industry

xtranormal

I am so glad I won’t have to throw my recent tutorial for this away – this was a tutorial I made for the Digital Storytelling for Young Learners EVO workshop and if the tech is similar it may still be needed – from the introductory video though, it sounds like the new team of programmers have simplified it a lot because the process I am describing in the slides below was neither simple, easy and it took quite a while to do,

I hope you give it a try because it’s by far the best I have used (apart from machinima in Second Life, of course!!!)
Please leave your comments and links of any xtranormal videos you have already made and saved on you tube!
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